Definition
A statutory misdemeanor under English law, consisting of the act of presenting a petition to the Crown or either house of Parliament bearing more than twenty signatures, where the petition sought the alteration of matters established by law in church or state, and where the contents had not been previously approved by the required authorities. The offense was defined and punished by the Tumultuous Petitioning Act 1661, 13 Car. II, St. 1, c. 5.
The statute imposed two interlocking restrictions. First, no petition for changes to established law in church or state could be signed by more than twenty persons unless pre-approved. Second, no such petition could be delivered or presented by more than ten persons at one time. Violation of either restriction constituted the misdemeanor. The approving authorities differed by location: in the counties, approval required either three justices of the peace or a majority of the grand jury at assizes or quarter sessions; in London, approval required the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Tumultuous" means loud, excited, and disorderly; marked by confusion and uproar.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Full of tumult; characterized by tumult; disorderly; turbulent."
The gap here is subtle but legally significant. Modern readers would likely infer that "tumultuous petitioning" describes the disorderly or riotous manner in which a petition was delivered — a petition accompanied by shouting, crowd violence, or civil disorder. The legal definition is quite different: the offense was defined by number and procedural non-compliance, not by the behavior of the petitioners. A perfectly peaceful gathering of twenty-one persons presenting an unapproved petition was equally criminal. The word "tumultuous" in the statute's title reflects Parliament's premise that large-scale organized petitioning was inherently threatening to civil order, not a factual description of how any particular petition was conducted.
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Why It Matters in Research
Tumultuous petitioning is primarily a historical English law term. Researchers will encounter it in two distinct contexts, and confusing them creates interpretive errors.
First, as a matter of English constitutional history, the 1661 Act is a direct response to the mass petitioning campaigns of the Civil War and Interregnum periods, when petitions with thousands of signatures were used as instruments of political pressure. Understanding the statute requires understanding that political context. Researchers working in 17th-century English legal or political history should treat the Act as a document of Restoration reaction, not merely a public order measure.
Second, and more importantly for American legal researchers, tumultuous petitioning appears in First Amendment scholarship and case law as a historical foil. The Petition Clause of the First Amendment — "the right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" — was understood by the Founding generation partly in opposition to restrictions like the 1661 Act. American sources arguing for a robust right to petition frequently invoke the Tumultuous Petitioning Act as the kind of Parliamentary overreach the Petition Clause was designed to prevent. Researchers tracing the original meaning or historical scope of the Petition Clause will find this term appearing in that argumentative context.
A trap in historical sources: several dictionary entries, including one in the Law Mind corpus, misstate the statutory citation as "18 Car. II" rather than "13 Car. II." This is a transcription error that propagated across reference works. The correct statute is 13 Car. II, St. 1, c. 5 (1661). Researchers citing the Act should verify against the primary source.
The offense has no American counterpart. No U.S. federal statute and no surviving state statute criminalizes petitioning on the basis of the number of signatories. Constitutional challenges under the Petition Clause would almost certainly defeat any such attempt today.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are broadly consistent in substance but divergent in accuracy on the statutory citation. Black's (2nd Ed.) and Bouvier both cite "18 Car. II," while Rapalje & Lawrence and the underlying primary source support "13 Car. II." This is a recurring error in the reference literature and a useful illustration of how errors compound across secondary legal dictionaries that borrow from one another without returning to primary sources.
On substance, all four sources agree on the core structure of the offense: the twenty-signature threshold, the ten-person delivery limit, and the pre-approval mechanism. None of the historical dictionaries engages with the First Amendment implications of the statute, which is expected — those implications were developed primarily in 20th-century American constitutional scholarship. Researchers should not treat the silence of these dictionaries on the Petition Clause as evidence that no connection exists; the connection is well-developed in encyclopedic and law review sources but postdates these reference works.
Bouvier's treatment is the most complete among the four, including the delivery restriction (no more than ten persons) that Rapalje & Lawrence omits from its truncated entry. Black's (1st Ed.) entry as it appears in the source material appears to be a mis-indexed fragment unrelated to this term and should be disregarded.
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Jurisdictional Note
The offense is purely a creature of English statutory law and has no American analogue. It is relevant to U.S. legal research only in the historical and constitutional context of interpreting the Petition Clause of the First Amendment. English law abolished or effectively superseded the 1661 Act through later reform legislation; it is not a live criminal offense in any current jurisdiction.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Right to Petition and Access to Courts — Constitutional Law Encyclopedia (constitutional_107)
The Petition Clause and Lobbying Regulation — Constitutional Law Encyclopedia (constitutional_190)
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